Biblion Bible Commentary
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A Reprobate Mind
Romans 1:28-32
28 Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting; · WEB
The third giving-up reaches the mind itself, and the vice list ends with something worse than practicing evil — applauding it.
Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting.
The third and final gave them up, and it reaches deepest. The first touched desires, the second passions; this one touches the faculty of judgment itself. The wordplay in the Greek is exact: they did not approve of retaining God in their knowledge, so God handed them over to an unapproved mind — a mind that fails its own inspection, no longer able to tell fitting from unfitting. The punishment for refusing to think about God is the decay of thinking.
Then the list, and its range is the argument. Twenty-one items, and they refuse to stay in the register of scandal: unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, malice — then envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil habits, secret slanderers, backbiters — then insolent, arrogant, boastful — and then, embedded among them without any change of tone, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, unforgiving, unmerciful.
Murder and gossip stand in the same catalogue. Envy and covenant-breaking, arrogance and unkindness to parents — the list is engineered to prevent the reader from finding a safe distance, because everyone is somewhere in it. The respectable sins are filed with the monstrous ones, which is precisely the trap chapter 2 will spring on the moralist who has been enjoying this chapter Romans 2:1.
And the final verse goes past the practice to something colder: who, knowing the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also approve of those who practice them Romans 1:32.
Approval is ranked as the further step, and the ranking repays thought. A person who sins against his own conscience still testifies, by his shame, that the standard stands. A person who applauds has dismantled the standard itself — nothing left in him takes the truth's side. The chapter that began with truth suppressed Romans 1:18 ends with the suppression complete: the knowledge is still present — knowing the ordinance of God — but the verdict has been publicly reversed, evil celebrated as good. That is the floor of the descent, and the letter now turns to the reader who thinks he has been watching it from a balcony.
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